Yes, Bonnie Shulman began her adult life as a poet, a
college dropout, a single mother on welfare. She toiled as a skivvy for Allen
Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute, established a poetry press, and returned, at
age thirty, to higher education as a freshman before finally obtaining a
doctorate in mathematical physics.

And yes, Shulman is now assistant professor of mathematics at Bates, where she
walks barefoot to class, practices Tai Chi on the Quad, and engages in
scholarly feminist critiques of the teaching of mathematics and science. She
researches wave propagation, lives in a geodesic dome in nearby Poland, and
writes personal memos on notepads from Pizza Hut.

Bonnie Shulman is all of this. Yet she is more because she is greater that the
sum of her parts.

Shulman's parents divorced in the early 1950s, when she was a young child. She
moved from her native Champaign, Illinois, to New York City with her mother, a
secretary who returned to school to become an English teacher. Her father, then
an agronomist, remained in the Midwest and
became a professor of computer information systems at DePaul. Shulman says this
parental estrangement created "the theme of the split": a dichotomous tugging
of science, represented by her father, in one direction, and of art,
represented by her mother, in the other direction. Shulman responded by
attempting to satisfy each parent's opposing interests.

"I had a lot of chutzpah as a little kid. Maybe it's natural in kids, and I
didn't get it knocked out of me," she remembered. Always good in math and
science but also intrigued with acting ("I was always a ham, totally a ham"),
she anguished over attending either the professionally oriented High School of
Performing Arts (of Fame fame) or the highly selective Bronx High School
of Science, both New York City magnet schools. She chose Bronx Science after
her mother informed her that academically there was no comparison between the
two. Scholastically, Shulman soared, but by her senior year, she simmered with
rebellion. Her grade-point average dropped (from 98 to 96). Interested in
physics, she faced a guidance department that believed nuclear physics was the
only appropriate career path -- but Shulman found such an avocation repugnant.
In any event, this was the early 1960s and Shulman, as a woman, received little
encouragement for a career in science. She also craved a social life. "I was
the perfect example of why people drop out of math and science," she said of
her departure from the science track.

"I was a bad girl. I didn't go on to college," she said, although she
grudgingly admits that she did attend the University of Pennsylvania for one
year. "It absolutely did not count," she insisted. "It was in the sixties. I
played guitar and wrote poetry. I cut class. Classes were suspended half of
the time. I didn't get credit for any of those classes," she said. "I was
rejecting all the cultural assumptions of my times." A worshipper of Bob Dylan,
she found herself writing in one of her notebooks, "Dylan quit school when he
was nineteen. What are YOU doing?!!!"

Science be damned, she decided. Instead, she was going to be a poet. Shulman
left college, "bummed around," and lived on an upstate New York commune with
her boyfriend. "I was here, I was there, I was totally spaced out," she said.
"With all of my shenanigans, I found I was three months pregnant on my
twenty-first birthday."

Her daughter, Hatha -- named after the style of yoga, of course -- was born
"the summer Nixon resigned." Shulman found herself living in New York City as a
single parent in desperate poverty. The academic superstar had plunged quite a
distance. "It was a scandal. It was awful," she said. "My mother was nagging me
all the time."

To escape the physical and emotional burdens of New York, Shulman ended up in
Colorado with her "other love" -- writing and poetry -- to which she dedicated
herself by studying with poet Allen Ginsberg at the newly established Naropa
Institute. "A terrific community flowered there, and I was right in the center
of it," she said. Raising Hatha and collecting welfare, which she supplemented
with income from typing and secretarial work, Shulman transcribed tapes for
poets -- "I was Allen Ginsberg's personal slave" -- participated in jazz and
writing salons, and published magazines, as well as some of her own poetry.

But suddenly, she was thirty with a nine-year-old, wearing secondhand
clothes, and typing papers for students. Friends in Colorado suggested she
return to college, perhaps to study English. One night, during a visit with an
old boyfriend who was doing some calculus homework, she looked over his
shoulder in the kerosene lantern light -- he was living in the tepee where they
had once lived together -- and corrected some of his figures. In shock, he
asked how she knew such math and became the first of her circle to uncover her
hidden past: SCIENCE. That's it, he proclaimed. That's what you must go back to
school to study. So she did.

Alphabetically browsing a list of available majors in a University of Colorado
catalog, she stopped at astrophysics and embarked upon a ten-year plan. She
began with astrophysics, ended up as a math major, re-entered the field of
astrophysics as a graduate student, and obtained a doctorate in mathematical
physics. Ph.D. in hand -- her thesis was about solar coronal loops -- she
arrived at Bates in 1991 with a tenure-track position in the Department of
Mathematics.

Wiry, with smiling green-blue eyes and closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair,
Shulman darts around campus in jeans and T-shirts. Sometimes, she wears running
shoes; often she does not. On such occasions, one can admire her toenails
painted a sparkling blue. "It's not just to be the aging hippie," she
explained. "I think better when I'm barefoot."

Because she pursues many interests, she has much to think about. At the
forefront of a movement dedicated to changing the teaching of science, she is a
founding member of the Calculus Consortium, a group of math educators working
toward calculus reform. She is similarly involved with other innovative
teaching developments at Bates, including Writing Across the Curriculum ("God
created this for me") in which writing is used extensively in the teaching of
science and in uniting the teaching of mathematics with biology. She advises
the student group Society for Women in Mathematics and Science (SWIMS) at
Bates. "It has been a place for women to gather, for whatever reason. The talk
is nonstop," she said.

Another primary concern is criticizing the traditional presentation of
scientific principles as indisputable truth. The approach -- analyzing and
questioning what is traditional in a scholarly fashion -- is the essence of
feminist criticism. In her essay "Implications of Feminist Critiques of Science
for the Teaching of Mathematics," published in the Journal of Women and
Minorities in Science and Engineering (Vol. 1. 1994), she wrote: "There is
a core of assumptions about science that sets it apart from other knowledge
systems and confers upon it a special status. This status is based on the
alleged superiority of two fundamental attributes of scientific knowledge: its
rationality and its objectivity."

Yet Shulman warns that mathematics isn't "a fixed body of knowledge --
complete, certain, and absolute." She says "we have a responsibility to
acknowledge that we are also teaching values when we teach mathematics.... When
we invite our students to appreciate the elegance of a proof, we should keep in
mind that such aesthetic judgments also vary across cultures and genders."

Although Shulman continues her research in wave propagation, her commitment to
feminist critiques of math and science has become her priority. Within the
larger mathematics community, according to Shulman, feminist critiques of
science are frowned upon. "What I'm doing is not mathematics, but it certainly
informs my teaching of math. It's crucial that I'm a mathematician and do math
in order to be credible," she said of her recent scholarly forays. "I see
myself as a bridge in many ways, between men and women, between math and the
humanities."

Shulman has emerged as such a figure, eager to wed the teaching and practice
of science with moral values. "Knowledge without wisdom is a very dangerous
thing," she told Mary Morse, author of Women Changing Science, Voices from a
Field in Transition (Plenum Press, 1994), in which she is profiled in an
interview from a chapter titled "A Brave New World: Women Speak on the Future
of Science."

"Social responsibility and scientists, for instance: There is a lot still
embedded in the culture that says, 'Hey -- you're after a pure pursuit of
knowledge. Let somebody else worry what happens with it. That's not your job.
In fact, that's why there are people trained in political science. Your job is
just pure pursuit of knowledge, and science is valuefree, and that's what's so
cool about it.' There's a delinking of values and science, which I think is
first of all impossible and not true, and leads to very dangerous kinds of
knowledge."

Shulman maintains that "the classical tradition breeds values out of you in
math and science. Compassion is weeded out. The culture breeds it out of you,
and it's no accident either," she said.

A great deal of anguished consideration preceded the switch from
traditional scholarship to feminist criticism of math and science. On
pre-tenure leave in 1994, she debated switching gears. She concluded that she
could not pursue hard mathematics and the history and philosophy of science and
mathematics simultaneously. "My contribution won't be to leave a poem or a
theorem," she said. "I'm looking for common ground, the common denominator in
human beings," she said. "Being a pioneer in spirit, I see an opportunity to
make a mark going where no one else goes, to this empty area. Most scholars
doing this kind of research are not pure scientists; instead, their fields are
the history of science, philosophy, or anthropology."

Like a number of her colleagues, Shulman received a 1994 Mellon Professional
Development Grant from Bates in support of specific teaching and research
projects during a professional leave. Unlike many other recipients who obtained
backing for a single project, she pursued a multitude of proposals: research on
wave propagation; collaboration with a colleague to develop a model for the
flux of large objects through the solar system; continued research in the
history and philosophy of science (feminist critiques of science, in
particular); and an investigation of successful undergraduate research programs
in mathematics at colleges like Bates.

Indeed, Shulman envisions herself as "an existence proof, a role model." In
her most recent Statement on Teaching, she wrote, "I see my role in the
classroom as both coach and cheerleader. I am firm in standards and caring in
my approach. I am present as a consultant, guide, moderator, and role model."

In 1994, as a testament to her success with students both in and out of the
classroom, Shulman received the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, an
annual distinction bestowed upon a Bates faculty member. "I cried," she said,
"because it's student-initiated."

For Shulman, the accolade confirmed a colleague's oft-voiced insight: "Human
beings have three basic needs: food, sex, and recognition." As she repeated
these pearls of wisdom, she added, "It's really true. I work really hard, but
there is lots of self-doubt, especially because I am trying lots of innovation.
The award continues to help when I'm wracked with self-doubt. It helps me to go
on taking risks. The feedback and the bonding with my students sustains me
through all the hardships; that's the lifeblood of my existence. Scholarly life
is personally satisfying -- I'm a math nerd, pens in pockets -- and I could see
becoming a hermit, piled up with books. But I can't get any of the satisfaction
I get with students out of scholarly work."

Read the words of a student who nominated her mathematics professor for the
Kroepsch Award on the basis of such inventive educational technique: "Picture
this: Your first day of class, and the professor walks in with six rolls of
toilet paper. The first day of Mathematical Modeling she gave us each a roll of
toilet paper, and we had to figure out how many pieces of toilet paper were on
the roll without unrolling it. Odd? Yes. Useful? You bet. The purpose of this
assignment is to teach us that the use of mathematical models is vast and
frequently very difficult."

Kelly McDonald '97 majors in both math and philosophy. In response to
encouragement from Shulman, he presented a paper last fall at the Mathematical
Association of America (MAA) regional meeting in Salem, Massachusetts, on
"Rotating Cylinders as Crude Aerofoils." Next fall, he plans an independent
study with Shulman on "The Philosophy of Math," a subject he decided to tackle
after making a reference to the philosopher Martin Heidegger in Shulman's
class. "She was all over it. She loved it," he remembered. Shulman immediately
shared two papers with him that she had written on the philosophy of math, a
response which, McDonald said, is quite characteristic of her. "In class, when
a tangential subject comes up, she says, 'Come to my office, and we'll talk
about it,' and she really means it. She epitomizes the attitude that
we're in college not to get a degree but to learn," he said.

Bates senior David Ferrone is part of a joint program with Dartmouth College,
where he will receive an engineering degree in 1997. "You can do really well at
Dartmouth if you find out what the professor is interested in. It's sort of a
scam," he said. It's preferable, he says, "if you can find something you're
interested in and learn about it. That's the best." And that's just what
happened in a modeling course with Shulman, where Ferrone prepared a paper on
the mechanics of snowboard turning. "She helped me to see what the problem was.
One of the things she reiterates is that math doesn't have to be a hard, hard
science, a reduction to an ideal. There's value in understanding a situation,"
he said. "I wouldn't have had an opportunity to give this paper in any other
course. Lots of teachers are impressed by things that imitate their own values
or beliefs. She comes closer to being impartial," he said.

During her modeling class last fall, Shulman devoted two full sessions to
the subject of ethics and commented on her disapproval of divorcing ethical
considerations from pure scientific research. "I disagree strongly with that,"
she informed her students, "but you're free to disagree strongly with me."

Shulman takes a very aggressive approach in her teaching. "It's not
passive," she said.

A veteran practitioner of the martial arts, with a black belt in Tae Kwon
Do and a first kyu in Aikido, she brings a large measure of internal discipline
to the classroom. "I need to be engaged with what I'm doing while I'm doing
it," she said. "I've got nothing against entertainment, but I'm not there to do
it to you, I'm there to do it with you. If you're drifting, I'm going to reel
you in. I try to be and am fairly successful at determining moment to moment
temperature. I take the pulse."

"It's chaos," Shulman said affectionately of her course in Real Analysis,
described in the catalog as "an introduction to the foundations of mathematical
analysis....a rigorous treatment of elementary concepts such as limits,
continuity, differentiation, and integration."

Math wimps beware. Shulman acknowledges that students consider it "a bear of a
course," but the description belies what one finds upon entering the classroom.
Chaos, indeed.

She teaches the straight math but stresses equally the other side of the
mountain. "I want them to think about who came up with these theorems. What
motivated them? Was it a headache? Or a mistake? I'm not Whiggish in my view of
history," she said.

She counsels students to be patient in their work. It took mathematicians some
three hundred years to come up with some of these aphorisms. "You just made the
same mistake that Cauchy made. You're in great company!" she might counsel one
of them, in reference to the esteemed mathematician's "wrong proof."

It's late on a Tuesday morning and Shulman, just back from a week-long
teaching methods conference, seethes with energy to cover all the material on
her agenda. Poised to begin, she holds a hasty sidebar conference with a
student about a math project and compliments the young woman. "You have four or
five really creative ideas," she says. As equations go up on the blackboard,
Shulman tends to answer student questions with inquiries of her own. "What do
you mean?" she asks one young man. "What's implicit about what you're saying?"
To another student's suggested equation she retorts in a friendly but
challenging tone, "Why would you look at that? I don't understand." She waits
for an answer, not just from him, but from any one of them. When she doesn't
get one, she cries out: "HELLO! Are we here or somewhere else?" Sensing an air
of hesitancy in their silence, she is willing to provide a bit of direction.
"What's the anti-derivative?" she asks, a touch of urgency entering her voice.
"All right," she says as she slaps the blackboard. "I'm going to make it
explicit this time."

She projects authority in a good-natured way, but remains humble and willing
to stand corrected with benevolent aplomb. "I take it back, I'm wrong.
Temporary insanity," she pleads after providing an incorrect answer.

The equations continue. "I want to give you this powerful way of reasoning,"
she announces as she introduces the concept of "asymptotically equal" to assist
them in their work. She reassures the class that the equations will only get
easier to solve. "I had teachers who not only made me walk barefoot to school
in the snow but gave me hundreds of these to do as well," she says. "You'll be
able to eyeball these."

Answers aside, she emphasizes process. "I'm trying to give you a broader
picture, a pattern, methods of reasoning," she calls out as she lopes from one
side of the room to the other. Two women in the front row are quietly
conferring in steady whispers. She addresses them once and then again. "What's
the question? If you've got a question, I'm sure at least ten other people have
it," she says. There are thirteen students in the room. "What's confusing
you?"

"Never mind," answers one of them.

Undaunted, Shulman replies, "What was confusing you?"

"I wrote down the wrong thing," the student admits sheepishly.

"I hate when that happens!" Shulman says, serving up some friendly comfort.

But the whispers between these two continue, and Shulman interrupts them once
more. "Share with us what you're saying," she implores as she commands the rest
of the class: "Somebody help. Look it up." Together the group tackles the problem,
finally arriving at an answer. To encourage the whisperers, she says, "That was
a good question. It helped clarify."

After the class breaks up into small groups, one of the two women, in a
bolder fashion, raises her hand to say: "I don't understand." Shulman answers,
"So when I said a few minutes ago, 'Does everybody understand?' that would have
been a good time to speak up." Math cum therapy. She manages to conduct this
psychological work as an integral part of real analysis, sitting peacefully
atop her desk one moment, dipping, then dancing across the floor the next.
"What's a clever way you might take a derivative of this? It's a chain
rule," she explains before breaking into a chorus of "Chain of Fools," exposing
the rich ore of sixties culture that runs through her veins.

"Let us admire this problem," she says. ".9999... = 1" goes up on the board.
"Do you accept it?" she asks with glee. When one young man responds
affirmatively, she counters with a jab. "You've seen it before, but did
you ever question it? These look like two very different numbers to me."

"Barely," another student answers.

"Barely, BUT!" she cries out. "You should feel a little uneasy about this. If
I had a million dollars and was offered $999,999, I would not be happy with the
exchange."

Fired up, she asks, "What three things did I teach you?" Again, no answers.
She pantomimes, then follows with a grandiose mouthing of "read my lips"; in
conclusion, she whacks both blackboard and table. "I know I made this joke
before, but the most important thing I learned to do in college was to read."

Actually, Shulman is not joking here. From her perspective, reading and
writing one's way through the sciences is an integral part of educating future
generations of professionals. "I see mathematics as much more than a bag of
tricks. It is a way of thinking that enhances one's insight, understanding, and
ability to critically evaluate information and relationships," she said.

Abigail Gallup '96, a physics major, said, "It's definitely not your
traditional course. It doesn't get boring. I don't have to worry if she knows
what she's talking about because she definitely does. She's definitely a role
model."

"How're you doing," a student asks her one afternoon at the start of class.
"Integral over time good," she responds.

The ability to pursue such innovation impresses a number of her colleagues.
Georgia Nigro, associate professor of psychology, points out that Shulman "has
the rare capacity to bridge the huge gulf between science and everything else.
She's willing to experiment." She compares Shulman with the mathematics
professors whose classes she attended as an undergraduate at Brown: "They were
such jerks, such sycophants. It was just torture to listen to these dorks, and
I like calculus," Nigro said.

Room 213 in Hathorn Hall barely seems to contain the radiant energy that
emanates from Shulman and the students who visit her tiny lair. On one
wall-sized blackboard, the chalk dust of hastily scrawled math proofs glistens
in the sunlight. A poster of Alfred Einstein consoles a visitor with the
soothing thought that whatever math problems she has couldn't possibly be as
bad as his; a second poster, equally prominent in its display, profiles the
professional history of Emmy Noether, a pioneer in Modern Algebra, whose
lifetime bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Cluttering her office are the obligatory computer, books, chairs, and personal
photographs, including pictures of author Grace Paley -- a friend -- and a very
young Shulman delightedly nuzzling her daughter, Hatha, then two years old.
Today, Shulman is working with Marko Radosavljevic, a senior from the former
Yugoslavia, whom she and Eric Wollman, professor of physics, are jointly
advising on his honors thesis, "The Vibrational Modes of the Grain Plasma and
Its Implication to the Creation of Galaxies." Shulman especially enjoys the
work for this confluent physics and math project. "It's delightful to share
research interests through the work of a student," she said.

The power of interdisciplinary sharing is almost aphrodisiac for Shulman, who
continually seeks ways to merge her identities as an artist and scientist. At
age forty-four, she finally feels comfortable with the synthesis she has
produced. In no small part, Shulman credits the egalitarian Bates environment
for securing peace in "the two camps warring, the research versus the poetry,
the left brain/right brain dichotomy, the humanities and the sciences, the
qualitative and the quantitative," she said.

Not long after her arrival in Lewiston, in response to a how-are-you-adjusting
e-mail query from her thesis advisor, Ellen Zweibel, at the University of
Colorado, Shulman responded electronically with great enthusiasm about all the
interdepartmental friends she was making at Bates. This was the sober response
from Colorado: "I was here for ten years before I knew anybody outside of my
department."

"That's the difference," Shulman said. "Bates is providing me with myriad
opportunities to focus on who I am as a human being and scholar." At Bates, she
says, education is for the faculty as well as the students. "There's too
much going on here. That's the way Bates supports me. An incredibly rich
intellectual life is possible here. For me, it's like I died and went to
heaven."

Shulman frequently accepts invitations to visit classes outside of the math
department. In an interdisciplinary methods class in which students interviewed
scientists, she spoke to Nigro's psychology students about her own professional
development. With these same students, who had spent considerable time
considering the role of the scientific community in the study of AIDS, she
discussed the function of mathematics in the controversial Tuskegee Experiment
(where researchers sterilized black men during the project). In a class called
"The Rhetoric of Nuclear Culture, 1939-1964," taught by Professor of Rhetoric
Robert Branham, she joined Bates poets Robert Chute (who's also professor
emeritus of biology) and Robert Farnsworth to read poems -- their own and the
work of others -- about "Imagining the Nuclear Holocaust" to illustrate the
belief that artists speak for the culture at large. In this same course, on
another occasion, she spoke about her experiences as an antinuclear activist
who sat on train tracks to protest the installation of a nuclear facility in
Rocky Flats, Colorado.

During her 1994 leave, Shulman gave a talk on "Ethics Across the Curriculum:
Teaching Ethics in Science and Math Classes" as part of a Science, Technology,
and Ethics Series. Charles Nero, assistant professor of rhetoric, attended the
presentation. "I couldn't possibly imagine having a conversation with a
scientist about gender and knowledge," he said. "I was rather surprised and
thought to myself, 'Scientists don't really do this.' Then I realized that
these people ask these kinds of questions, too," Nero said of her lecture,
which in part explored her decades-old fascination with the moral dilemma faced
by the Manhattan Project atomic scientists. Nero's scholarship and teaching
place an emphasis on "the coherence we maintain in our lives through metaphor."
Through discussions with Shulman, he has marveled at the importance of
metaphors in the production of scientific knowledge. "I am fascinated by our
unpredictable, nontraditional approaches to our scholarly lives," he said.

Shulman has also found a soul mate of sorts in Judith Isaacson '65, who taught
math at Lewiston High School and at Bates as a lecturer before serving as dean
of students. In 1977, Isaacson resigned to begin writing Seed of Sarah,
an acclaimed autobiographical account of her experience at Auschwitz and later
as a slave laborer for the Nazi war machine. Mathematics and writing link
Isaacson and Shulman; the Holocaust of European Jews joins them in still
another, unspoken, fashion.

"For my whole life, for no reason I can state explicitly, the Holocaust has
been a key experience, my moral compass. I've always come back to it," Shulman
said. She grew up as an American Jew in a time when details of the Holocaust
remained unutterable; not until years after the fact did she learn that her
father was an American liberator of a satellite concentration camp in Germany.
Her fascination with literature about this tragedy seemed shameful to her,
"like an obsession. I always felt like it was pornography, like I had to read
it in secret. I read the Diary of Anne Frank a million times, and people
would always say, 'Why are you so obsessed? Don't be so morbid.'" Shulman often
wondered, into adulthood, how she might have behaved in such a situation, and
how such circumstances can and do recur in the presence of a world community.

"Meeting Jutka (Isaacson's Hungarian name) was like coming out in a weird
way," she said. In fact, when Shulman cut her hair quite short last summer, she
could not bring herself to show Isaacson. After several weeks of not hearing
from her friend, Isaacson called and discovered that Shulman was worried her
appearance would remind the older woman of Auschwitz. Isaacson insisted that
she come anyway. When Shulman arrived, "she had put on very long earrings, even
though she was barefoot," said Isaacson, who greatly admired the haircut. "It's
tremendously becoming; it brings out her very witty features. Bonnie always
goes to extremes, but very pleasing extremes," she said. The haircut reminded
her nothing of Auschwitz -- "we were in rags" -- although the bare feet did,
something she did not mention.

In fact, the two women don't discuss the Holocaust. Instead, they base their
friendship on mathematics, poetry, and gardening. "I admire her so much,"
Isaacson said. "She is a true scholar who is thrilled by her work. She follows
a path I did not have the opportunity to pursue. Bonnie knows exactly what she
wants -- things don't just happen to her. It's a life I might have chosen for
myself if I had had the choice. When Bonnie writes a poem, it is something I
would have done. I relish that. To me, mathematics has always been spiritual,
philosophical, and poetic, yet I've never expressed it" the way Shulman has.

Isaacson also admires Shulman's work on science and gender. She shares
Shulman's concern "that math be used in a morally correct way. Bonnie has to do
what she is excited about. She has to do what she is 100 percent interested in.
She's not swayed by others' opinions. She does what's morally right and
intellectually challenging."

While pursuing her master's degree at Bowdoin in the mid-1960s, Isaacson
encountered a morally offensive word problem presented by the professor in a
course on game theory. "I was so outraged that I almost decided not to teach
mathematics," Isaacson said. Years later, knowing of her Bowdoin encounter,
Shulman shared with Isaacson a textbook problem used in a teacher's handbook
printed in Nazi Germany:

"Problem 200. According to statements of the Draeger Works in Lubeck, in the
gassing of a city only 50% of the evaporated poison gas is effective. The
atmosphere must be poisoned up to a height of 20 meters in a concentration of
45 milligrams per cubic meter. How much phosgene is needed to poison a city of 50,000
inhabitants who live in an area of four square kilometres?" In a subsequent
scholarly essay, Shulman reflected on the morality of mathematics, that
supposedly value-free discipline. "Word problems are notorious for instances of
sexist, racist, and other more subtle cultural biases," she wrote.

"As a kid I wanted to be named Sarah," says Hatha Swanson, now a
twenty-three-year-old certified massage therapist who lives in Portland,
Oregon, where she is studying to be a naturopathic doctor. She admires some of
the same qualities Isaacson sees in her mother. "It's over my head what she
does," her daughter admitted, but then, "it's not so much what my mother does
but how she does it. It's more her integrity, on how she's getting there, what
she sacrificed. I utilize her strength by her example. She's 100 percent."

Like mother, like daughter. Hatha, an "A" student, repeated a little bit of
history by running away from home at age fifteen to follow the Grateful Dead
for three and a half years. "I feel like I broke her heart, but it's mended,"
Swanson said. "We've reconnected on a different level through science, through
the issues of women and science. It's the question of whether women are
competent in the field. My mother proved that by being at the top of her class,
not just getting by."

Like most academicians, Shulman is busy and then some. She has an image of
herself as one of the performers who used to appear with some regularity on the
Ed Sullivan variety show, throwing plates in the air and spinning them by
holding sticks in their mouths; the tantalizing possibility lingers, naturally,
that all the crockery will come crashing down.

Recently, Shulman sent some quotations concerning mathematics, poetry, and art
to Isaacson. Among them was this quote from the Greek philosopher Proclus:
"This, therefore, is mathematics: she reminds you of the invisible form of the
soul; she gives life to her own discoveries; she awakens the mind and purifies
the intellect."

This, therefore, is Bonnie Shulman, shimmering with the possibilities of
discovery.

"Where Things Happen That Don't"

As the final assignment in her course "Calculus for the Queasy," Shulman asked
students to write a poem. Throughout the semester, the class had explored
mathematics in technical terms by producing serious written work on topics such
as infinity, incommensurability, and the historical development of the ideas of
the calculus. "I wanted to stimulate their imaginations about these ideas as
well," she said. The professor completed this assignment, as she had all others
in the course, along with her students and wrote this poem, later published in
Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal, No. 8, July 1993.

in fin ity

How can any thing
made up of no thing
Amount to some thing?

(A whole is the limit of
the sum of its parts)

An infinite sum of little bits
each bit a little bit less
until it is less than the least little bit
you can imagine
and yet still less
but never zero
never nothing
always something

imagine something
smaller than the smallest
you tell me how small
I'll tell you how close
and I'll get even closer
and then get even
closer
How close til I'm actually there?

Do we jump
or glide
from here to there
from now to then?

Is time a sequence of moments?
A stream a collection of drops?
What is it waves
in the ocean?
in the boundless sea
of infinity
where things happen
that don't